The behaviors, assumptions and attitudes of police officers are strongly influenced by the overall ‘culture’ of the service. The police service culture has been established and reinforced over many years. Police officers naturally tend to tolerate and conform to the behaviors, assumptions and attitudes common to the culture. They may find they are most effective as police officers if they behave in the way the culture demands, or they may feel they have to do so in order to ‘fit in’ and feel comfortable around fellow officers. They may not believe themselves to be acting or thinking in accord with any culture, and the actions in question may not be overt, conscious or deliberate. That is the nature and influence of an organization's culture and the way it is shared amongst the organization's members.
This is not unique to police service. Most public institutions, and likewise private sector firms, develop a culture of their own—with prevailing behaviors, assumptions, attitudes and vocabulary amongst their employees. Such a culture can be a positive strength. It can attract people to join and stay with an organization, and it can help people work well together in performing the organization's business.
Efforts to change the weaknesses in a culture must not destroy the strengths that help give an organization its effectiveness. But a culture has a problem when some of its consequences come to be judged unacceptable. For the police service, that public judgment has been reached, and is acknowledged by senior officers and officials.
The common thread of unacceptability is a police service culture with behaviors, assumptions and attitudes that fail to accommodate the differences between individuals, or worse, that are based on stereotypes of race, sex, age, or dress. It has been stated that it was not enough for police officers to be fair and to avoid acting on stereotypes by treating everyone the same. Instead, the challenge is to treat everybody as individuals.
Whilst the nature of policing is unique, this challenge of individualizing the treatment of all members of the public is not unique to the police service. It is one that is shared by many other public servants—by tax inspectors, employment and benefits advisers, fraud investigators, and all others who must offer public services to people with individual needs and circumstances, and must do so with equity.
For police and other public services, changing behavior towards individuals requires awareness of diversity amongst members of the public. But awareness of diversity does not produce change without the breaking down of old habits of behavior and action, and without the acquisition of new skills, including:                being able to recognize one's own stereotypes and false assumptions about other people        knowing how to determine quickly the important circumstances—emotional as well as physical—of each individual        understanding how to deal with people according to these circumstances, as well as according to the equity of relevant policies and procedures.        
These skills and behaviors are not easy for anyone to acquire, and it must also become a new habit for officers to apply them in both routine and exceptional circumstances on duty. Achieving this re-skilling and breaking down of old habits is at the heart of the challenge at hand.
It is a challenge similar to the one faced by many private sector companies seeking to win and retain consumer business. The nature of the diversity that needs to be recognized by a business may be different, and simpler, than that which the police service must recognize. The opportunity may exist for businesses to decide to ignore some apparently ‘unprofitable’ individuals; a moral luxury police service cannot have. And for the private sector, the consequences of failure to individualize treatment are seldom matters of life, death or basic human dignity for the individual concerned. At the center of individualized treatment is the awareness and validation of assumptions which may tend to cause the treatment of people in a generalized manner.